It is the first Unicode encoded font to include non-Latin scripts (Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew). It was designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow in 1993, and was first shipped with the Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 operating system.

The font comes pre-installed with all Microsoft Windows versions since Windows 98. A nearly identical font, called Lucida Grande, ships as the default system font with Apple's Mac OS X operating system, until switching to Helvetica Neue in 2014 with OS X Yosemite, and in addition to the above, also supports Arabic and Thai scripts.

Letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet, particularly upside down letters, are aligned for easy reading upside down. Thus, the font is among the most ideal for upside-down text, compared to other Unicode typefaces, which have the turned "t" and "h" characters aligned with their tops at the base line and thus appear out of line.

A flaw in Lucida Sans Unicode is in the combininglow line character (U+0332) and the combining double low line character (U+0333), which are rendered as a blank or as a simple tiny underline when font-size is less than 238 point or so in word processors, whereas combining double low line is rendered a simple low line in web browsers, no matter which font is used.